What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared
to what lies within Us

According to Project Poughshares' Armed Conflict Report, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Approximately five percent of the population controls the majority of the nation's wealth. Over half the population is unemployed and forty percent of households struggle with issues of food security. Infastructure, including health care, electricity, and running water, is scarce. In addition HIV/AIDS is widespread. However, not much of this is surprising considering that Haiti has been bombarded with IMF economic policies, a US lead economic embargo, and American backed political organizations since 1990.
Unlike San Francisco, which can afford to retrofit buildings to be earthquake resistant, Haiti, struggling to subsist, cannot. Looking over the last decade we see disaster strike again and again in the impoverished regions of the globe. The 2001 Savadoran earthquake, the tsunami in Sri Lanka, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the list goes on... Thousands die where infrastructure and institutions cannot be afforded to protect individuals from natural phenomena, resulting in a disaster.
If the disaster is brought to the world's attention, people tend to come forward in an outbrust of charity and nations come together in support of emergency relief. But as we necessarily reach into our hearts and bank accounts for Haiti, perhaps we must also look at our "natural" disaster track record and ask the question: Is this disaster is the result of a earthquake ranking 7.0 on the richter scale or is it the fate of an impoverished country unable to avoid disaster when natural phenomena hit because of the perpetual cycles of global disparity? If the latter is the case, beyond reactive emergency relief, what are we going to do to prevent the next Sri Lanka? New Orleans? Haiti? from happening to begin with?